Fairy language issues
Jun. 11th, 2018 04:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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conlangWorking on a fairy language for a story of mine, started to come at it from the culture on up. Taking into account the species is long lived, I'm giving the language two modes: fast mode for emergencies, and slow mode. Slow mode I estimate takes them twenty minutes to have what in English would be a five minute conversion, even before taking into account that very old people like that would probably go into incredible detail in their stories, just because their language is full of sounds held for seconds at a time, deliberate gaps, phonemes repeated multiple times in a single word, and the fact even simple words are long. I'm having trouble writing these sounds and gaps down because I'm not a linguist, but that'll have to wait until I can make a video post so you can hear what I mean.
Other cultural considerations include:
1. The fact they are knowledge seekers and people of science (including the science of magic).
2. Physiological considerations like how they never forget anything, but can archive memories they don't need, usually because they're repetitive. That resulted in six different types of time tenses.
3. Their culture doesn't think of objects in the way we do in the West. Our language in the West is informed by the idea of the platonic ideal, where all objects have an ideal form behind the form, like for instance, all chairs are pale imitations of the platonic Prefect Ideal Chair. But this fairy culture, not so much.
The best way to illustrate this is that in English, we have basically one word for a single object, for example "cup." They don't focus on the cup, but on the contents. Their word for cup would be constructed something like (substance)+(container shape)+(container type)+(optional additional identifying trait of the container), so the same object would have a different name depending on what was in it. If it's empty, the substance in the name would be "air" or "void." For another example, a river isn't "river," it'd be "large water in a ribbon shape" or "large water ribbon."
How this preference for substance relates to words pertaining to people is complicated, but essentially reverses the process, focusing on the container and its appearances, since by any definitions, the substance of a person can't be seen from the outside. (And they would consider the mind to be the important substance in this case.)
4. Their society is collectivist, but has room for some individualism. Part of how I came up with the above bit in #3 was from thinking about how everything and everyone in their culture is defined by their relation to other people and things, and reflected that in the plans for the language. So far, it's affected naming conventions and given me this vague idea of there not being any real pronouns, just like, different forms of words depending on the subject, like Spanish has, but without the actual pronouns.
5. I kinda want their language to lack forms of "to be" like is, am, was, were, and are, the way E-prime does, since it would fit with the stuff about containers and substances. It would be a reflection of their focus on seeking knowledge, and their focus on science, since E-prime removes barriers to the street for knowledge by removing the absolutism and certainty inherent in languages using "be" type words.
Thus, their language would instead describe things as objectively as possible. Instead of "John is a mean person," they'd have something like "John sometimes does things perceived as unkind."
This ties in with number three, because the substance-first layout has a lot of inherent doubt and ambiguity, especially as relates to people.
~
But the main reason for this post is I am trying to think of other possibilities for ways a language might be set up that are outside the usual norm for human languages, like the way Klingon uses phonemes that don't often appear in human languages. But specifically I need help with the grammar. (Read numbers three and beyond in the text above for part of the grammar I've already figured out.)
What I'm trying to do is a grammar that's just plain weird, but not too terribly complicated (since I'm not going full Tolkien on it, mid-air it'll just get used for a few sentences here and there, for like spells), and also meshes with number three above. Mostly I need ideas and a plain English overview of ways grammar can be constructed. Even if it's a link to a page that explains it, or maybe there's a "linguistics for dummies" book, I dunno. I just haven't had much luck with the dense and confusing jargon of linguistics so far. If I can be given the ideas in a form I can comprehend, and maybe some ideas, I can sort out the rest.
Sure, I could half ass it, but I want it to look like an actual language to someone who knows the patterns to look for, and I'd prefer if that hypothetical person could tell it wasn't just misled after English. I could probably do that with what I have now, but it wouldn't hurt to ask for ideas.
Also, this race is one of the major Ancient Races of fairies in the story, and this project is helping me figure out their culture, too.
Other cultural considerations include:
1. The fact they are knowledge seekers and people of science (including the science of magic).
2. Physiological considerations like how they never forget anything, but can archive memories they don't need, usually because they're repetitive. That resulted in six different types of time tenses.
3. Their culture doesn't think of objects in the way we do in the West. Our language in the West is informed by the idea of the platonic ideal, where all objects have an ideal form behind the form, like for instance, all chairs are pale imitations of the platonic Prefect Ideal Chair. But this fairy culture, not so much.
The best way to illustrate this is that in English, we have basically one word for a single object, for example "cup." They don't focus on the cup, but on the contents. Their word for cup would be constructed something like (substance)+(container shape)+(container type)+(optional additional identifying trait of the container), so the same object would have a different name depending on what was in it. If it's empty, the substance in the name would be "air" or "void." For another example, a river isn't "river," it'd be "large water in a ribbon shape" or "large water ribbon."
How this preference for substance relates to words pertaining to people is complicated, but essentially reverses the process, focusing on the container and its appearances, since by any definitions, the substance of a person can't be seen from the outside. (And they would consider the mind to be the important substance in this case.)
4. Their society is collectivist, but has room for some individualism. Part of how I came up with the above bit in #3 was from thinking about how everything and everyone in their culture is defined by their relation to other people and things, and reflected that in the plans for the language. So far, it's affected naming conventions and given me this vague idea of there not being any real pronouns, just like, different forms of words depending on the subject, like Spanish has, but without the actual pronouns.
5. I kinda want their language to lack forms of "to be" like is, am, was, were, and are, the way E-prime does, since it would fit with the stuff about containers and substances. It would be a reflection of their focus on seeking knowledge, and their focus on science, since E-prime removes barriers to the street for knowledge by removing the absolutism and certainty inherent in languages using "be" type words.
Thus, their language would instead describe things as objectively as possible. Instead of "John is a mean person," they'd have something like "John sometimes does things perceived as unkind."
This ties in with number three, because the substance-first layout has a lot of inherent doubt and ambiguity, especially as relates to people.
~
But the main reason for this post is I am trying to think of other possibilities for ways a language might be set up that are outside the usual norm for human languages, like the way Klingon uses phonemes that don't often appear in human languages. But specifically I need help with the grammar. (Read numbers three and beyond in the text above for part of the grammar I've already figured out.)
What I'm trying to do is a grammar that's just plain weird, but not too terribly complicated (since I'm not going full Tolkien on it, mid-air it'll just get used for a few sentences here and there, for like spells), and also meshes with number three above. Mostly I need ideas and a plain English overview of ways grammar can be constructed. Even if it's a link to a page that explains it, or maybe there's a "linguistics for dummies" book, I dunno. I just haven't had much luck with the dense and confusing jargon of linguistics so far. If I can be given the ideas in a form I can comprehend, and maybe some ideas, I can sort out the rest.
Sure, I could half ass it, but I want it to look like an actual language to someone who knows the patterns to look for, and I'd prefer if that hypothetical person could tell it wasn't just misled after English. I could probably do that with what I have now, but it wouldn't hurt to ask for ideas.
Also, this race is one of the major Ancient Races of fairies in the story, and this project is helping me figure out their culture, too.
